A Gripping, Limited Call to Arms: Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments
There are so many happy endings that dystopia and utopia become almost indistinguishable by the novel’s end.
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Posts Tagged: dystopia
A Complicated, Shifting Subjectivity: Talking with Franny Choi
Franny Choi discusses her second collection, SOFT SCIENCE.
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Writing in Earnest: Talking with Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah discusses FRIDAY BLACK.
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Pinterest Prepping
Nothing seems fixed or stable anymore except ongoing instability.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Peter Mishler
Peter Mishler discusses his debut collection, Fludde, the effect of ritual on poems, and childhood psychology.
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This Future Is Here: Talking with Tom McAllister
Tom McAllister discusses his new novel, How to Be Safe, workshops, Twitter, dystopia, and narrative voice.
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Letting Go of What We Love: Talking with Rachel Heng
Rachel Heng discusses her debut novel, Suicide Club, the book’s genesis, her writing and reading life, and her thoughts on “wellness.”
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A Source of Life: Red Clocks by Leni Zumas
There’s a lot left unsaid between the women of Red Clocks; not even they know the extent to which they’re all connected.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Sarah Blake
Sarah Blake discusses her new collection, Let’s Not Live on Earth, questions in poems, monsters, and the challenge of writing a dystopia.
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I Am Here to Make Friends
I’m not here to wallow in what feels like our new dystopia, no. Me? I am here, to rest up before the next bout. I am here to watch The Price Is Right and make friends.
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Nothing Foreign about It: Talking with Omar El Akkad
Omar El Akkad discusses his debut novel American War, suicide terrorism, fossil fuels, and blankets.
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The Possible Absence of a Future: Talking with Jorie Graham
Jorie Graham discusses her latest collection, Fast, the terrifying destruction of our planet, a happy formal accident, and how to live in times of world crisis.
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A Specific Kind of Loneliness: In Conversation with Geeta Kothari
Geeta Kothari discusses her debut collection, American xenophobia, and the immigrant narrative.
...moreThis Week in Books: American Purgatory
Welcome to This Week in Books, where we highlight books just released by small and independent presses. Books have always been a symbol for and means of spreading knowledge and wisdom, and they are an important part of our toolkit in fighting for social justice. If we’re going to move our national narrative away from […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Well, it’s been one week under the Trump administration, and already we are living in a land of “alternative facts.” After Kellyanne Conway used the term to defend Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s falsehoods regarding the inauguration crowd size on Sunday, the American people were, understandably, reminded of George Orwell’s 1984, and sales of the book […]
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The Rumpus interview with Jeremy P. Bushnell
Jeremy P. Bushnell discusses his new novel, The Insides, themes of consent, and designing a post-apocalyptic board game.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Malka Older
Malka Older discusses her debut novel Infomocracy, the nature of elections, and the future of democracy.
...moreThe Handmaid’s (Cautionary) Tale
At The Establishment, Laura Beans discusses the importance of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as a predictive novel, drawing many connections between the novel and increasing attempts to control women’s bodies: Instead of seeming further from the truth, the novel’s warnings only seem to echo louder in recent years. Atwood’s analysis of her own twisted […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Granta’s summer issue is themed “The Legacies of Love,” and in a new story from the online issue, Glasgow-based writer Sophie Mackintosh strips love back to its animal bones in a story that is less rom-com and more Hunger Games, but without the love triangle. Murder class was the new thing, but of course they […]
...moreImagining A Dystopian Olympic Games
At the Huffington Post, Maddie Crum and Maxwell Strachan ask 7 science fiction authors to hypothesize about what a dystopian Olympics might look like. While most of the authors acknowledge the influence that climate change and technology will have on the Olympics, Crum and Strachan note that the authors’ responses are surprisingly optimistic. Here’s how Malka Older, […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Some people write about dystopian futures, or reimagined folktales, or ghosts, or science fiction. Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of the upcoming story collection Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone, does it all. The debut collection, out this month from Black Lawrence Press, weaves Japanese folklore and pop culture into fantastical plots and futuristic […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Chris Jennings
Chris Jennings talks about his new book Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism, incremental reform, Transcendentalists, Shakers, and creating a more perfect future.
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The Circle Is Watching
In a world where boundaries between private and public are already blurring, Tim and Nicolaas wanted to find out what would happen if those boundaries disappeared altogether.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Imagine a world in the late 21st century: countries are underwater from the rising oceans, Europeans have become refugees, and a mathematical formula has been discovered that explains the entire universe, the applications of which include human flight (sans airplane) and the ability to remove pain and grief. That’s the world Lesley Nneka Arimah has […]
...moreThe New Science Fiction
The stories we tell ourselves can help us understand, and maybe even adapt, to this new world. But the dour dystopias and escapist fantasies of our current science fiction diet just won’t do. We need something new: a form of science fiction that tackles the radical changes of our pressing and strange reality. Claire L. […]
...moreLiving in the Republic
The church on Siegfeldstrasse was open to anyone who embarrassed the Republic, and Andreas Wolf was so much of an embarrassment that he actually resided there, in the basement of the rectory, but unlike the others—the true Christian believers, the friends of the Earth, the misfits who defended human rights or didn’t want to fight […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Laura van den Berg
Author Laura van den Berg talks to the Rumpus about why she thinks America is obsessed with dystopias, the intersection of surrealism and realism in her work, and choosing an ambiguous ending for her new novel, Find Me.
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The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show: Oliver de la Paz
In Episode 6 of The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show, Dave Roderick chats with poet Oliver de la Paz about his new collection, Post Subject: A Fable, video games, and his weirdest writing habit.
...moreAre YA Dystopian Novels Breeding Conservatives?
The Harry Potter series might have been helping make young kids more open and accepting of diversity, but a new crop of young adult novels might be push kids in the opposite direction of the political spectrum. Heroines like Katniss Everdeen and Tris Prior aren’t just strong women–they’re exceptionally special people oppressed by nanny states […]
...morePeak Dystopia
Adam Sternbergh, author of Dystopian novel Shovel Ready, asked whether readers are burning out on the Dystopian novel. He goes as far as suggesting that perhaps the next great novel will be a Utopian one. Emily Temple, writing at Flavorwire, explains why Utopias don’t make good novel settings: The reason that utopian novels are far […]
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